But I wanted to post this in here to hopefully catch the attention of an Epic employee who this question would apply to, or could direct me to someone like that.
Specifically I’m curious as to whether Epic can release the PDB files for each Editor build (4.3, 4.3.1, 4.4, …) , which from what I can tell are already being stored in Epic’s Perforce depot (//depot/UE4/Engine/Binaries/[platform]) and would simply need to be hosted somewhere where engine subscribers could download them.
This would be a huge help to teams like mine where we use the Epic updater for most of our developers to update their Editor, but at the same time would like the ability for our programmers to be able to effectively analyze crash dumps from their editor sessions.
As long as this were hosted for each build in a similar manner as the source dependencies (namely an optional additional download), this shouldn’t cost Epic much, but would greatly benefit its subscribers.
If this is tricky to coordinate and couldn’t be done immediately, it would still be very helpful if someone could host the files for the latest release (4.3.1) until this could be figured out.
I’d also like to add in an analysis of the actual file size we are talking about here from IRC:
Either way thanks for considering and thanks for this wonderful engine, and I look forward to a response!
We’ve talked many times about how to make these available, but haven’t really figured out a good way to do it yet. We’ve talked about running our own symbol server, hosting them on an FTP, and even including the source with the launcher’s version of the engine so that you can generate the PDBs, as long as you have a compiler installed.
I’m actually leaning toward including them in the binary-only distribution. They do compress well, but only to about 25% with the zlib or Windows implementation. The 7z results look great but I don’t know if we can use that yet. I’ll revive the discussion about it here and we’ll see where it takes us. Thanks for the feedback – it is good to know that this is important to you guys!
We thought that only having the PDBs might not be useful compared to having the full source available as well from the Launcher builds, which we’re looking into. You are still seeing valid crash symbols for your own gameplay module’s code right?
I’d love to have access to the PDB’s for these as they might hint as to what is preventing me from editing my levels.
Has there been any progress on providing them? I’d be happy with an as-is torrent of the pdb’s with the version included to the filename…
I just found the PDB’s. Go to the launcher and find the panel for your editor. Select the down arrow and then options. In the dialog that appears, check the “Editor symbols for debugging” checkbox. Hit Apply!
